nterest in the ulterior consequences of the transactions in which he
is immediately engaged. This appears to hold true in an accentuated
degree in the domain of that large-scale business that draws its gains
from the large-scale modern industry and is managed on the modern
footing of corporation finance. This modern fashion of business
organisation and management apparently has led to a substantial
shortening of the term over which any given investor maintains an
effective interest in any given corporate enterprise, in which his
investments may be placed for the time being. With the current practice
of organising industrial and mercantile enterprises on a basis of
vendible securities, and with the nearly complete exemption from
personal responsibility and enduring personal attachment to any one
corporate enterprise which this financial expedient has brought, it has
come about that in the common run of cases the investor, as well as the
directorate, in any given enterprise, has an interest only for the time
being. The average term over which it is (pecuniarily) incumbent on the
modern businessman to take account of the working of any given
enterprise has shortened so far that the old-fashioned accountability,
that once was depended on to dictate a sane and considerate management
with a view to permanent good-will, has in great measure become
inoperative.

By and large, it seems unavoidable that the pecuniary interests of the
businessmen on the one hand and the material interests of the community
on the other hand are diverging in a more and more pronounced degree,
due to institutional circumstances over which no prompt control can be
had without immediate violation of that scheme of personal rights in
which the constitution of modern democratic society is grounded. The
quandary in which these communities find themselves, as an outcome of
their entrance upon "the simple and obvious system of Natural Liberty,"
is shown in a large and instructive way by what is called "labor
trouble," and in a more recondite but no less convincing fashion by the
fortunes of the individual workman under the modern system.

The cost of production of a modern workman has constantly increased,
with the advance of the industrial arts. The period of preparation, of
education and training, necessary to turn out competent workmen, has
been increasing; and the period of full workmanlike efficiency has been
shortening, in those industries that emplo